Compromise
by nimmieamee
Summary: Minific. How Hermione learned to compromise.


Katrina Abel's boy was capable of upending garbage bins over the neighborhood bullies, she reported. He taught her how to eat new things. He believed — just pretend! Of course it was pretend. How nice of his Mentor to be such an imaginative person — that in their fantasy-play, he might make a nice Gryffindor.

Finch-Fletchley's girl, rather alarmingly, was partial to Slytherin. But Finch-Fletchley felt, in the interests of fairness, that one had to remember that she thought it was all make-believe at this point, and also that it was terribly far-sighted of her to want to enter the den of the snakes and reverse its thinking. Marvelously ambitious, that one. Full of promise. Shame she thought it was all a game.

Tremlett simply wrote: _Tariq is more than ready to find out. For that matter, I'm more than ready to tell him._

This was the new development closest to Hermione's heart, the program she'd crafted all on her own, the first thing she'd fought for and succeeded at, even if the more conservative relics of the old Ministry had exacted some concessions. And so she'd meant to sit and think it over that very morning — properly think it over, research similar approaches in other countries, determine how best to propose it to Kingsley. But she didn't have the time to respond.

At the start of the work-day she'd had a screaming row the Prophet would later characterize as a "lively debate," with Smith, over the issue of leveling any taxes at all on Gringotts' vaults which were more than two hundred years came the problem of hag immigration. Travers, who handled that department, was of the opinion that it was a non-issue. No hags were emigrating. Thank Merlin. When she pointed out that this was due to his long-standing policy of awarding witches and wizards a slap on the wrist for killing foreign-seeming hags on sight, he took offense.

_He's offended!_ she thought, still fuming, going over her revisions to that particular MLE imbroglio, _I'll show him offended!_

Noon brought a goblin crisis to a head, which the stupider Undersecretaries seemed to think might be well solved if someone would just go out and procure the head of a goblin. Afternoon ushered in the oldest relic on the Wizengamot now that Dumbledore was gone, Crepusculus Nott, complaining of the educational resources siphoned away from nice, sensible children to be given to the werewolves. For roughly three hours, he stood in her office and threatened to turn Kingsley into a peach.

"I don't believe that's what impeach means," she'd told him, trying to keep her temper under check, "Or that we do that in our current political system."

"You don't tell me what an impeachment spell does!" he'd cried.

Yes. It had been a headache day. And now — now memoranda shot in from every corner of the Ministry, exploding from her chimney and bursting from the desk drawers she really shouldn't have given over to Secretarial Correspondence.

_Horrifying!_ screamed one.

_Despicable waste of the Minister's time, to have him sign off on such a program! _shrieked the Howler from Care & Representation Magical Creatures, a department which had never forgiven her for limiting their ability to control and regulate.

_The Prophet will hear of this_, vowed Games & Sports (which really ought not to have had any kind of opinion on it, but which was — and had long been — in the pockets of the Baddock-family-owned Baddock Broomstick Company).

_You'll overturn the Statute of Secrecy!_ cried Muggle Artifacts, which had been getting rather cheeky ever since Hermione had granted their senior-most member a generous severance package before he could do anything troublesome based on his shaky grasp of Muggle culture. (Given what working at the Ministry could drive a witch to, she would have had to murder him. And as this was her father in law, her husband would have been rather upset with her.)

She called in her junior secretary to deal with the mess.

"Well, news of the Muggle-born mentoring was bound to hit their ears sooner or later," said her secretary.

"Just as the children are coming along tremendously," she said, "Do you know what I think? I think they've finally realized that — that Dumbledore had the right of it all along. That children are powerful. That the way you shape them matters."

"That was your lot that taught them that," said her secretary, "That wasn't mine."

"And — and after complaining for years that Muggle-borns are stupid, that they don't know anything—"

"Up until now they haven't, and I shouldn't think it's been anything but lovely for some people, having all that empty space to shove revolutionary ideas into—"

"Oh, shut up, Greengrass," Hermione said, "You sniffed about it, too. You all did. But you didn't do anything. You just laughed at these — these children who were torn from their world and dumped in yours, and you didn't want to teach them anything. And now that we are—"

"Yes, yes," said Daphne, "Now they've lovely Guides to help them. Muggle-born helping Muggle-born. It's sweet. It's…"

Hermione shot down a memorandum rather ominously, daring her to say something dismissive.

"You're going to need to put the MLE on it," was all Daphne said, "Let them know who to protect, now that these little darlings are in contact with our big bad world. And it'll puff up Weasley's chest a little more; he's your robin ginger-breast, isn't he?"

"Yes, turn this into an opportunity for a dig," Hermione snapped, "Just like one of your lot."

"My lot does things like make a lot of noise about hag policies, and then slips in an awful new change for Muggle-borns when everyone's caught up in the hag mess," said Daphne, "My lot is political. Don't say you haven't learned from us."

This was, regrettably, true. She had learned. If someone had told her, a very small her, that there was a world with people like Greengrasses and Notts and Smiths in it, she would have wanted not just to beat them. She would have wanted to learn from them, too. She'd been, in her own way, an ambitious marvel.

"Now they're making noise about this," Hermione said thoughtfully.

"Yes," Daphne said, rolling her eyes, "Yes. Stars in your eyes now. We can push this, and let them worry over it enough to let us do something about the poor little house elves, or, knowing you, even the bloody centaurs. Then we'll push that, and behind their backs—"

"Bend the Statute a little," Hermione said, "Maybe. Move forward, at any rate."

"Pretending to compromise, and then not compromising at all. I really don't know why you Sorted where you did," Daphne grumbled.

* * *

originally posted on my tumblr, livesandliesofwizards.


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